Free Child of Vengeance by David Kirk

hoarse, as though they had been arguing for some time.
    “We have to do it. He’s up there on that hill, alone,” said the first man again. Bennosuke rose and moved as silently as he could to peek out into the night through the bamboo slats of the dojo’s doors. It was too dark to see anything but the vaguest sense of movement. “We got tools. Don’t need a sword, a sickle’ll do just fine. We’ll just do it and go. We have to.”
    “He’s not alone. His son’s up there with him.”
    “Good. We’ll do him too, clean the village up.”
    “Look at you—you can barely walk. Turn around, let’s go home.”
    “We have to do it—he has to answer for it!”
    “And suppose you fail? You want him to lose his head again and do for the rest of the village? It’s too dangerous.”
    “I can do it,” said the first man, and then there was a snort that might have been a sob. “I have to do it.”
    “No, you don’t. Let’s go home,” said the second voice.
    “My sister …” said the first.
    “I know,” said the second man.
    “In the fire …” the first barely managed, and then he broke downcrying. They were drunken tears, loud and sloppy. He bawled for a few moments, until his friend started muttering soothing things to him.
    “Let’s go home,” the second man said eventually, after the heaviest of the tears had passed. The first man assented with a sniffing grunt, and then slowly the sound of the pair faded into the night, leaving Bennosuke to wonder what it was he had just witnessed.

    I n the morning sun, Munisai walked where he had walked as a child, and it all seemed so alien. He barely even registered the way the peasants melted away from him, bowing low and anxiously, or the way mothers would place their children behind themselves.
    Miyamoto was a village like so many hundreds of others in Japan, a great network of paddy fields carved into the slope of a valley so that it seemed to rise like some eccentric curved stairwell. Munisai’s estate was on high, the temple of Amaterasu highest of all on the opposite face, and then down on the valley floor the squat, dark shape of the dojo hall dwarfed the humble wood-and-thatch shacks the peasants lived in.
    This was all spread before him, but though his eyes took it in he barely saw it. The samurai walked along the ridgeline, glancing around. There, a tree he had climbed; there, the stream he had drunk from; there, a tiny shrine for a rock spirit where he had left offerings. All that was part of what he was, and yet it seemed so distant. Had he really grown up here?
    He headed for the landward valley and the ruins that must be there. They were not ruins in his memory, though. The samurai remembered them alive, and then the samurai remembered them ablaze. He hesitated just before he came to the ridge, took a breath to steel himself, and then walked over and downward.
    It was quiet. Once it had been a mirror of the other valley, a hub of life and labor, but now all was left to waste. The path beneath his feet was thick with moss and grass and free of any mark of human footfall. He passed a discarded barrel that had been claimed by bees, the dull hum of the insects like some funeral choir. The wind rustledlong, ragged grass that burst forth from what remained of the dry and crumbled paddy fields.
    None of this concerned him. He was no farmer nor architect nor keeper of bees. What he looked at were the blackened stumps clustered in sad communion in the base of the valley, each as dark as the night had been when he had walked this very path eight years ago.
    The remains passed him by, the thickest of foundation pillars and the gnarled ends of tree stumps. All were charcoal. He noticed that on one or two of the larger ones someone had carved ancient prayers for the dead, asking that the souls find peace in the afterlife and that they not return to earth to menace the living.
    Munisai reached out and touched one of the stumps softly. It felt cold and dead. He